Chapter 7: Same Everything

I’d mostly stopped sleeping, so I was the one in the kitchen at two in the morning when the basement door opened and he came up.

It had been like that since the bag. What he did in the basement, before that, had been a thing he did to the machine — to a copy, a stand-in — and I could almost hold it away from me like that. The bag took the away part off. Weeks of my own underwear, pulled out of the wash and kept and used, said the copy had never been the point. I was the point. And I slept at the end of the same hall as a man who’d been collecting me in a bag behind the dryer.

The chair had been going under my door handle since the doll first got strange, back when I couldn’t have told you what I was barricading against. Now I knew, and I kept doing it, and lay on top of the covers counting the noises of the house. The fridge. The pool filter. And some nights the other one — the slow knock and the breath, coming up through two floors of a sleeping house out of a locked room.

On the worst of those nights, lying still in the dark of my own room was worse than anything that could happen out of it — one flight and a hallway and a chair that wouldn’t hold between me and the thought of him. So I’d give up on it and go down. Just to be on my feet somewhere, moving, with something cold in my hand, instead of flat on my back over his head, counting.

One of those nights, he didn’t know I was there. I had the fridge open and its light on me — bare legs, the thin sleep tank I’d stripped down to in the heat, my underwear and nothing else under it — drinking orange juice out of the carton because there was nobody left in the house I respected enough not to. He came up the stairs slow and heavy and stopped dead in the doorway when he saw me.

For a second neither of us moved.

He had his shirt off. He had it balled up in one hand, and the whole front of him was bare — the heavy chest, the big soft slope of the belly hanging over the waistband of the sweatpants, all of it shining wet under the fridge light, the hair matted flat in dark whorls where the sweat had run down it. A bead of it slid over the curve of his stomach while I watched and vanished into the waistband.

Below the overhang of the belly his gray sweatpants sat low, and the front of them was dark and wet in a patch that spread up from the heavy shape underneath — a shape gone soft but not all the way soft, still filling out the cloth. I knew that stain. It was the fresh version of what I’d found crusted stiff in a bag behind his dryer three days ago. He’d pulled his pants up over it minutes ago and carried it into the kitchen like it was nothing.

The smell reached me a second after, across the whole kitchen, and then it was in my throat. The after-smell, the thick one he hauled up the stairs every night, except now I was standing in it instead of catching the tail of it from a floor away — sweat gone sour in the folds of him, the low ripe reek of a body that ran hot and washed little. And threaded through it, sharp and pale, the other thing — the same thing I’d smelled coming up off the stiff front of my own underwear. I made myself not name it, and named it anyway, and my throat closed on the juice.

“You’re up,” he said.

“I’m up.”

He didn’t reach for the shirt. That was the thing that got me. A month ago he’d have grabbed for it, gone red, mumbled, scurried off down the hall.

He just stood there in the doorway wearing the smell of what he’d been doing and looked at me over the fridge light, and his face had gone loose and easy, unbothered — a man who’d just done the worst thing there was to do and found it cost him nothing, and had quit being ashamed of any of it, including letting his eyes go slow down a kid in a tank top and her underwear.